We had reservations for a full week at Carson RV Resort. No beautiful views at our site which faces the back of a Costco, but we are surrounded by foothill mountains. We are in a safe and convenient park to use as a home base as we explore Carson City. And the giant building helped protect us from the constant winds.
This is our second visit to Carson City. Years ago, we took a family trip to visit Doug’s sister, Bev and her family. We remember the great times we had exploring the area. For me, that was my first glance at the majestic mountains of the West – the beautiful Sierra Nevadas and their rolling foothills. Before that trip, the furthest west I had been was Gettysburg, PA. I remember coming out of the airport and taking a deep breath – my first breath of the clean light air. And now we have time to check out even more of this city.
We drove a short distance into the heart of the city and visited the Nevada State Museum and Mint. The displays were impressive. The exhibit about the old silver mining industry was a twisting trek through realistic mines. The displays were as diverse as Nevada – including the Nevada State fossil, the ichthyosaur and some ice age megafauna. We saw antique slot machines and incredible samples of the many minerals in this state’ s soil. We watched the old Coin Press in operation which goes back to 1870 and is the official US Branch Mint.
Nevada State Museum (in the original Mint building)The “mine” in the basement of the museumMammoth!
We couldn’t resist a day on Lake Tahoe. We staked our chairs on Sand Harbor State Park beach. We picked a Monday morning thinking we could avoid the crowds of the weekend but the narrow beach was filled with families enjoying the cool sparkling clean water, bright sun and a mild breeze. We watched paddle boards, kayaks and tubes and everyone on them was having a great time. We enjoyed just sitting on the sand in our chairs, watching their fun and marveling at the crystal clean water, giant trees and sheer cliffs. Mark Twain described Lake Tahoe as “the fairest picture the whole earth affords” and we agree.
We went back into the city center one day to enjoy a Thai lunch at The Basil – a popular restaurant and the main street. We wandered this pretty city with lots of benches, flowers and official buildings. We made sure to do a tour of the State Capitol building with its shiny silver dome and beautiful marble, wood and mural on top of the walls in the newer Capitol building that replaced the first one. We like to see the pride that goes into these State buildings. We gave Carson City a high rating – there are lots of benches, clean streets, no parking charges and plenty of convenient parking lots with a vibrant main street to walk down.
Nevada Capitol
Carson City proved to be a great stop for us – giving us time for laundry, shopping and learning about the great beautiful State of Nevada. Then we had a one-night stay in Red Bluff, bringing us into California.
The gray gravel site at the Ely KOA was no where near as pretty as our last site, but it was level, big enough, clean and had a great view of the mountain range in front of us. We relaxed after a short drive and spent Father’s Day talking to family. It turns out there is lots to do around Ely. Monday we went out first thing to see this town and run errands. We took our very dirty dusty car to a car wash only to drive on a five-mile-long dirt road a few hours later. Oh well, it’s only dirt!
This very long straight dirt road took us to an historic site – the Ward Charcoal Ovens. Definitely something we’ve never seen before. These ovens produced charcoal from 1876 to 1879 for the silver mining industry. Later they were used as shelters in bad weather and a hideout for an occasional stagecoach bandit. The six beehive-shaped ovens are 30 feet high, 27 feet in diameter at the base. Each oven took ten days to burn 35 cords of wood which equaled 1750 bushels of charcoal. Of course, this meant depleting the area of trees, but they are growing back now.
The best part of our visit was our hike on the Willow Creek Trail. This perfect half mile hike brought us heavenly smells – pinion pine, juniper, sage and brittlebush. As we passed a marshy area, the scent of the wild primroses made us smile. Then we saw a small babbling brook – sparkling clear water rushing over rocks. The sound refreshed us after hundreds of miles of viewing desert scrub. To me, this was an iconic moving stream of water – THE “babbling brook” we’ve all heard about. (Bev, this would have been your spot to put your feet in.)
We saw quite a few miniature prickly pear cacti. Only a couple of inches tall!
On the side of the road, we saw four pronghorn – just standing still! That’s unusual – we have seen them before but always moving quickly. They were just chillin’ and looking right at us.
We drove a little bit further to see Cave Lake but were disappointed. All we could see was the dredging operation – no water at all!
Tuesday, June 18th was our long-anticipated Lehman Caves Tour. We are glad we reserved our spots early since all tours were sold out when we got there.
Before our tour we went to the Great Basin National Park Visitor Center and also the Lehman Caves Center. We saw a movie about the Great Basin and bought some things. We like to support the Western National Parks Association stores because some of our purchase money does go back to the parks.
The tour was amazing! The cave is beautiful – highly decorated with thousands of speleothems filling the twisty tight passages we walked through. We did miss the variety of colors we get to see at Kartchner Caverns. I think this tour really gives you an idea of wild caving – with formations on every side of you.
The Grand Palace Tour was ninety minutes. We walked through some areas quickly but were able to stop in the more open areas. In those larger spaces, we were happy to have plenty of time to explore. We carried our own flashlights and phones which we used to take lots of photos. We saw magnificent plate shields, fat highly decorated columns and turnip formations. The turnips were bigger and more perfectly formed than we are used to seeing. There was one area with standing clear water that looked like a fairy tale scene. Our guide was great, and the ninety minutes sped by. It was a thrill to see this cave; to squeeze and bend through the ancient rock shapes. We highly recommend this one.
A day of rest and relaxation and then back on the road. We drove the “loneliest road in the world” – a very long stretch (about 200 miles) of a straight two-lane highway through endless miles of sage. You get mesmerized by the vast flat scrubby land and then you see that you have to cross the mountains. We (Doug, of course) climbed over ten ridges. The highest was Robinson Summit, 7588 feet above sea level.
We stopped at Cold Springs Station, a different kind of RV park. There were a few sites sprinkled between little white cabins and a motel. The office was actually a full size restaurant and bar. But we shall forever remember Cold Springs as “the land of a million crickets.”
It turns out they are called “Mormon Crickets”, actually katydids – fat, black and a multitude of them. The story about their name is that when the Mormons were trying to settle around the Great Salt Lake they were besieged with these crickets – literally a plague of them while they were trying to sow their crops. Soon, the gulls came and demolished those giant bugs, and all was well. This is why the gull is that Utah State bird.
Lots of crickets!
Meanwhile, we had to set up in the midst of these creatures. They seemed to move away from us, which was helpful the next morning when I had to walk across the park to throw out the trash. But there were thousands – all moving in the same direction – and it was like parting the sea as I walked through them. I may have imagined it, but I heard one loud chirp while I was in the bathroom that night and I am convinced that we have a stowaway.
After a few days of overnight stops in extreme heat, we landed in Las Vegas. We spent three nights at Las Vegas RV Resort – a place we’ve stayed in a few times and the place that holds the title of the very first campground we stayed in our RV. It’s clean and convenient.
Once again, we didn’t bother gambling. This time we did the full tour of the Hoover Dam. The Dam, with its art deco everywhere, is a huge awesome engineering feat. The tour was worth the $30 each and took us to the Powerhouse as well as through strange and amazing tunnels winding into the concrete of the Dam.
Lake Mead was low but still a mighty force of water. We found ourselves examining minute cracks in the tunnels and questioned a large blotch of calcite deep inside the Dam!
The rock the Dam is built into is a beautiful pinkish basalt. Up close you see the evidence of ancient inner earth fires and then millions of years of movement and erosion.
There is a new bridge providing a second way over the river. The bridge structure picturesquely frames the mountains. It was another day of very high temps, so we stayed inside as much as possible and enjoyed a nice lunch in the Snack Bar.
Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge over the Colorado river
We did venture outside one evening for a great Thai dinner in a popular restaurant right on Fremont Street. (I loved the spicy Chicken Larb Salad while Doug ate every bit of his Pad Kee Mow.) We got in our steps under the world’s largest LED Canopy Screen on Fremont Street. It was certainly an “experience”- loud music, a huge light show above us, glittering neon surrounding us, and a happy variety of strange people to watch. The gorilla danced enthusiastically, the “vets” sold palm decorations, there were nurses who wore only strategically placed band-aids above their waists, the Chippendale booth boosted some well-toned bodies, and all in all, it was the “experience” we wanted but two hours was about all we could handle.
Fremont Street ExperienceThe Flaming Praying Mantis
And then we left all that noise and flashing lights to spend three nights in the opposite kind of place – Cathedral Gorge State Park. Not far from Area 51 (which we have yet to visit), we took Highway 93 – not the long and winding road, but a very long straight and rather boring road through part of the enormous Great Basin. To help with boredom, we often listen to an audiobook. This trip it’s Betrayal of Trust by J.A. Jance. We pulled into undoubtedly the best site we have ever had. So big – with a large ramada of over an equally large picnic table in a manicured gravel circle that could have easily fit our largest Flamingo gathering.
Right across from our site was the perfect desert nature trail that brought us right up to the buff-colored cliffs and into many small tight slot canyons formed by erosion. The formations and canyons of the Gorge quietly tell of the freshwater lake that existed here in the Pliocene Era.
It is aptly called Cathedral Gorge. The rocks stand tall and majestic in their profound silence. We explored. We marveled. The rocks are both basic and intricate. Solid yet eroding. I see rocks like these and try to comprehend their long histories – of ancient seas, tremendous pressures and endless times of nature impacting them. And this awesome geology was right under our fingers.
We leave here on Father’s Day for a short ride to Ely.
Our first two stops after leaving Kartchner Caverns were Gila Bend and Needles. Both of these RV parks are familiar to us and have been frequent stops coming and going from Arizona. Our one-night stays there were happily uneventful.
We spent two nights in St. George, Utah at Hurricane KOA. KOAs are usually easy for us – close to the highway we are traveling on, usually pull-thrus so we don’t have to unhitch our toad and have stores and laundries if we need them. This one was a little odd. At check in we were told we had to unhitch because it would be too tight to pull into our site while pulling our car. That was true. The sites were barely long enough, and our car had to be parked diagonally in front of the RV. With our four slides out we were very close to our tiny neighbors in their R-Pod. And these were “buddy” sites – our door faced our neighbor on the other side. They were nice people but it’s not always a comfortable set-up.
We happened to be there during the International Ironman Competition in nearby St. George which presented a massive traffic problem so on our second day we just relaxed until later in the day when we drove into Hurricane (pronounced “Hurricun”) to explore. We visited the small but very interesting Pioneer Museum and talked to the friendly docent there. We learned about the history of the Hurricane Canal which made the city possible. It took a daunting 50 years to hand dig the canal. It doesn’t exist now because of an earthquake. This is the kind of tourist stop we enjoy – local history and strange artifacts. I even got to see two dolls that I loved – Honey Baby and a pretty Ginny doll. We added a stop for a Mother’s Day dinner at Mekong Kitchen for great Thai food (Red Curry for Doug and Spicey Drunken Noodles for me). We ended our day stopping for essentials at Walmart.
As with the rest of Utah, St. George and the other smaller cities near there are spotlessly clean, beautifully landscaped and, of course, have the advantage of spectacular red mountains in the background.
FILLMORE, UT
We left early to get ahead of the wind on Sunday, May 8th. The drive was short and easy with a short rest stop to stretch our legs. The owner at this perfectly manicured KOA was nice enough to not charge us for an early check in. The cottonwood trees were barely moving in the gentle cool breeze when we arrived. We had time for a nap after lunch, some phone calls from the kids and then the wind hit. The gusts are ferociously moving the cottonwoods and making lots of noise. We are facing in a good direction, so we haven’t had to bring in our slides or worry too much. Hopefully, things will quiet down before we leave tomorrow for our last stop in Utah.
Well, the wind shifted directions and one of the cottonwood branches started hitting our slide, so we brought that one in. A little cozier but still our comfy home. Then the rain came and lasted most of the night. And it got cold! We woke up to snow on the nearby Cedar Mountains.
Just a short ride today but we have to figure out the logistics of leaving at check out – 11 am and arriving at the State Park at check in – 3 pm when we don’t have far to go.
WILLARD BAY STATE PARK
This is such a pretty park. Each site is huge with its own covered ramada over the picnic table. We got here just a few minutes early and drove right to our site. Still haven’t met the hosts. It’s really chilly here – and overcast.
The drive today was beautiful. For many miles we drove along the San Pitch Mountains in the Wasatch Range. The largest and highest spot is Salt Creek Peak. Our highway alternated by aiming right at it or positioned this magnificent peak just to our right. The Wasatch were covered with snow and sparkling in the sun. We even had a few snowflakes hit our windshield.
Those flakes were pleasant unlike the aluminum cans that were flying out of an un-tarped recycling truck ahead of us. A flying can hitting our rig sounded like a gun shot. Hope it didn’t live a dent!
Safely and warmly tucked away in this quiet park for our last night in Utah.
The beach at Willard Bay
TWIN FALLS, IDAHO
We have made numerous visits to Twin Falls and love it here. Our past blogs relate some of our Twin Falls adventures. The Perrine Memorial Bridge gave us a look at those brave souls who jump and parachute into the river. The waterfalls are spectacular: Twin Falls, of course, and Shoshone Falls, deemed to be the “most dazzling waterfall in the state.” There are also the Perrine Coulee Falls.
Looking into the Snake River Canyon explains why I have so many photos of it. This steep canyon with its winding green river is famous with stunning views. Anyone remember Evel Knievel?
I had a strange adventure doing the laundry. I was happy to see a spotlessly clean laundry room. Everything was shiny and bright but there was a small puddle on the floor around the drain. It was a narrow room, but I easily skirted the puddle and took two of the 4 washers to do my clothes. I sat outside reading and when I went back in the puddle was a bit larger. I put my clean clothes into two large dryers and left to go back to the RV. Upon returning, the puddle was considerably larger but not near my dryers. I put my dry clothes from the top dryer on the immaculate stainless steel folding table. I went to get the second load and that dryer was icy cold and the clothes were wet. I transferred them to a different dryer but that one refused to let me put quarters in. So, I went back to the good dryer and used that one again.
Another woman came in with 4 loads of laundry. I directed her to watch out for the growing puddle, showed her the two dryers that were malfunctioning and left to report the problems to the office.
As I started folding my clothes, a manager came in – she was surprised that the washer that seemed to be leaking was the one marked “out of order”. She opened the front door – out gushed an entire tub of water. The flow hit the opposite wall. I had just moved two steps in the right direction so only a few drops hit my legs but now the floor had about 2 inches of water and the drain was obviously not working. The other woman was trapped but dry on the other side of the puddle.
This manager was asking me about the dryer problems when another manager came in the back door with a string mop and bucket – so inadequate for this mess! The first manager had her back turned talking to me and trying to mess with the bad dryers when the second manager opens the broken washer and another onslaught of water rushes out. He got soaked.
My clothes are still dry on the table, so I get my first load out of there and back to the RV. When I returned for the second load in the dryer, the water is now rippling along the floor in little waves.
In spite of the problems, both managers exhibited excellent customer service – helping us get our clothes out without the clothes or us getting wet. They managed to disconnect the evil washer (finally!) and were valiantly attempting to soak up gallons of water with the pathetic mop.
I left with clean dry clothes, and I guess that’s all I can ask for. But it certainly was not the usual time in the laundry.
CALDWELL, IDAHO
Just a one night stay at the perfectly manicured Ambassador RV Park. We’ve been there before also, and it proved to be an easy site to shelter in during the evening’s rain.
PENDLETON, OREGON
We have driven through Pendleton, but never explored it. With a 3 night stay we had a little time to check it out. Pendleton is famous for its Wool Mill, producing beautiful wool blankets with Native American motifs, and the Pendleton Round-Up – one of the best- known rodeos in North America. We weren’t there for Round-Up days and the Mill was closed for tours.
We found an even better place to check out – the Museum at Tamastslikt Cultural Institute. The main exhibits take you through 10,000 years of native culture. The Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla tribes have a rich history in this area and are currently thriving with agricultural and casino enterprises.
The temporary exhibit was my favorite. Native women re-created their childhoods, their traumas, their dreams using mixed media inside antique metal doll houses. Each display takes you into the mind and heart of the creator and by using the iconic houses of our youth, they etched their histories in small, contained rooms that exposed their souls. It was eerie, real and touching. One house, done in mostly white designs, showed the devastation diabetes has had on tribal lives. The structures in the house were all done with sugar crystals – the stark and sharp evidence of this deadly disease. Other houses had many small beds representing the awful history of the Indian Training Schools where young Natives were sent to learn English and American ways but were indoctrinated in ways that were intended to destroy their culture. An eye-opening experience for us. It was the last day of that exhibit, and we are grateful to have had the luck to see it.,
Artwork outside Tamastslikt
We stayed the extra day here to avoid the rain, thunder and wind that had been forecast. This meant that we arrived a day late to our new job but our supervisor, Jeff, agreed that it was better to arrive safely.
HELLS GATE STATE PARK, LEWISTON, IDAHO
So, on Monday, May 16th we got to Hells Gate State Park. We met up with Jeff at the Discovery Center. He has given us carte blanche to develop our own interpretive programs. He gave us a broad outline of expectations and offered his support and the support of the staff and other volunteers. We have a few programs already done, but we have to re-design them a bit to work here. It’s a challenge that I think we are up to.
Swallow’s Nest Rock across the Snake River from Hells Gate State Park
After dinner our first night, we took advantage of the late-setting sun here and strolled along the Snake River path. It’s about a half mile walk from out site in the Volunteer Village to the Discovery Center and depending on what we do with our programming, that might be a nice commute. We will spend the next few days getting acquainted with this beautiful park and the people we will be spending our summer with.
